Forthcoming

What might it take to improvise a life tenacious on an earth at loose ends with itself? In Exology: Planetary Upheaval and Social Life, Martin Savransky pushes social and environmental thought out of bounds to unsettle our understanding of the planetary present while activating a speculative imagination to stride the earth’s anarchic share. The “Anthropocene”, Savransky argues, is an interior disaster. It is the atmospheric mutation of modernity’s interiorisation of the earth, its harnessing of imperial and terrestrial forces in the production of a global order where to be is to inhabit, to inhabit is to be inside, and to be inside is to be governed: to be contained by a proper name, by a proper place, by a proper function, by proper laws, by property, by the proper itself. Contending with the regime of permanent planetary instability that marks this geohistorical state of affairs, Exology strays out, swerves wild, experiments with improbable forms of life so as to elaborate a thought and praxis of the outside. Neither outer space nor some harmonious dwelling place, the outside names an improper topology of intensive spaces, insurgent interstices, and imperceptible forms of flight through which social life eludes and evades capture in the ongoing refusal to be content what is proper to it. Throughout the book, Savransky follows ungovernable modes of (non)human sociality —migrating plants, practices of marronage, stray urban dogs, makeshift infrastructures, unsanctioned friendships between disparate forms of life— in order to think ways of commoning the insubordination of improvising a life tenacious in the planetary mess that is the present tense. At once conceptually original, deeply researched, and poetic, Exology invites us to experiment with new vocabularies, styles of imagination, and practices of freedom on an earth that keeps its promise not to make promises, to be neither gift to Mankind nor necessarily hospitable to life.